COLOUR, TEXTURE AND BOUNDARY INFORMATION: IMAGE SEGMENTATION INTEGRATING COLOUR,TEXTURE AND BOUNDARY INFORMATION

Elemental segmentation techniques based on boundary or region approaches often fail to produce accurate segmentation results. Hence, in the last few years, there has been a tendency towards the integration of both techniques in order to improve the results by taking into account the complementary nature of such information. The method is composed by two basic stages: nitialisation and segmentation. In the first stage, the main contours of the image are used to identify the different regions present in the image and to adequately place a seed for each one in order to statistically model the region. The segmentation stage is performed based on the active region model which allows us to take region and boundary information into account in order to segment the whole image. Furthermore, with the aim of imitating the Human Vision System when a person is slowly approaching to a distant object, a pyramidal structure is considered. Hence, the method has been designed on a pyramidal representation which allows us to refine the region boundaries from a coarse to a fine resolution, and ensuring noise robustness as well as computation efficiency.